The trend in the telecommunication industry is to evolve the communication infrastructure from deploying specialized hardware with proprietary application (e.g., traditional class 5 end office switch) to deploying commodity hardware, open Operating System (OS) platform, and open application software (e.g., soft switches, 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) Internet Protocol Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) architecture, etc.). The result of this movement is that the next generation network (NGN) consists of an extremely large number of diversified types of hardware servers running a variety of open OS and software applications that need to work together to provide end-to-end communication services.
An NGN, e.g., an IMS network, comprises hundreds of network entities (e.g., standard servers, blade servers, specialized gateways, terminal servers using Linux, HP-UX, SUN Solaris Operating Systems etc.) to support end-to-end services for millions of subscribers. Each of these servers is responsible for a portion of the end-to-end communication services in an end-to-end call flow.
Daunting challenges arise as an NGN service provider continue to grow an NGN network due to the interdependency of existing network entities and new network entities to be deployed. Installing a new network entity involves upgrading and re-configuration of many already deployed network entities that need to interact with the newly installed network entity.
In addition, open OS and application software used by the deployed network entities require frequent maintenance updates, e.g., OS and software patches and new releases, etc. An upgrade operation on a network entity can impact other network entities it interacts with. An upgrade error can expose the entire network to the risk of service interruption for all subscribers.
Since network entities use different hardware and OS architecture and are implemented to support different part of the end-to-end communication service processing, the capacity of each network entity varies dramatically. At any given stage of the network growth, the network capacity may be limited by a different type of network entity. Thus, an NGN operator must constantly deploy additional network entities whenever capacity needs become necessary for a particular type of network entity or server. Given the aforementioned network growth complexity, an NGN operator faces a difficult challenge in the growth and the maintenance of an NGN.